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Book: Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry
Quotes of Book: Collected Essays: Slouching
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  1. Joan Didion _ Collected Essays: Slouching

    Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.
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  2. Joan Didion _ Collected Essays: Slouching

    You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing - beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code - what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil." I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of "morality" seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power {or survival} politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work.
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  3. Joan Didion _ Collected Essays: Slouching

    To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent
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  4. Joan Didion _ Collected Essays: Slouching

    It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.
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  5. Joan Didion _ Collected Essays: Slouching

    anise tea. "Meditation turns us on," Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.
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  6. Joan Didion _ Collected Essays: Slouching

    Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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